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Gentlemen, I propose, for your consideration; Imagine a world where our movies and TV are easily accessible though a client not unlike Valve's Steam. Where companies rule the board not through ads, or control, but through superior service.

Where piracy was recognized not as being a malicious act of bad, faceless evil people, but just generally the better alternative to get your shows and films not having to deal with corporations doling them out otherwise who just cannot fucking accept the existence of the internet so have sought out to destroy their so-called competition instead of embracing it, becoming one with it.

tell me, gentlemen. If such a client or opportunity existed that combined the best parts of Netflix, iTunes, Steam and youtube, that focused it's business on the changing wants of it's customers, would you consider using that over piracy?

Do you know who is producing the new season of Arrested Development? Not NBC, not FOX, not A&E....Netflix. I imagine within a couple years we'll see more and more shows picked up by studios like Amazon Instant and Netflix instead of NBC, FOX and the like.

The tides ARE changing, and they're flowing towards paid instant streaming services. If the prices for instant streaming stay low and the content continues to rise, this will be the future.

Incorrect. Netflix is not producing Arrested Development. They are distributing it. Ron Howard's production company, Imagine Entertainment, is producing it. Through all this rhetoric about 'Hollywood' being the bad guys, keep in mind that it's the studios (employees are business and marketing experts) that are the bad guys, not the creative and skilled people that make the movies because they get paid to make them. The studios get paid to sell them.

Thanks for the correction. Even so, I believe that my point stands. Distribution by services such as Netflix and Amazon instant instead of the big networks will become more prominent in the near future.

Gentlemen, I propose, for your consideration; Imagine a world where our movies and TV are easily accessible though a client not unlike Valve's Steam. Where companies rule the board not through ads, or control, but through superior service.

I own every DOOM CD (bought at full retail when they first came out) plus all the user-generated WADs, yet I was happy to shell out even more money to Steam for a bundle that duplicates all of those. Why? Superior customer service. All the tweaks to make it run smoothly (DOSBox configuration, sound drivers, etc.) are done and done right, and it runs fine on Windows XP.

Netflix is easier to use and cheaper than cable - used in America (not the same advantage in Europe).

edit: Someone replied to me and deleted - my reply,

I'm with you on that, free is better than easy. If I did have to wrangle media into how I want it, it's worth learning. I've had to convert flac to mp3 a few times, mp4 to divx once. Free and easy is better than easy. Even then, I'd rather use a rewriteable dvd than a box by my tv that needs internet.

I had the exact same idea not even a couple of months ago when I downloaded Skyrim from Steam (first purchase). I was thoroughly impressed by the price and how easy it was.

What I wanted to include was elements of the upload ease of a site such as Vimeo, where you have a professional channel that allows technical specs and crediting. It could be an excellent platform for both independent filmmakers and studios, as they could work hand-in-hand with each other.

I imagine a filmmaker (not unlike myself) uploading a couple of really good free short films to his channel, building a rep for himself by acquiring views and followers and then eventually charging a minimal price for people to 'unlock' the newest video content (say $2 for a 20 minute episode or $5 for a feature). After a one-time fee through their login account, they can access the video at any time from any computer as long as they're logged in, similar to Steam.

Not only would this eliminate 90% of the distribution costs, but it would maximise the amount of direct income the filmmaker actually acquires in exchange for content.

I'm based out of Brisbane, Australia and would love to try and help set something like this up.

Imagine a world where our movies and TV are easily accessible though a client not unlike Valve's Steam.

iTunes has this already. So does Netflix. What can you offer that isn't there already?

They're doing this with "big media" content. Big media is still getting paid. What you really want is something like Louis CK's deal, where the transaction is between the artist and the customer, without the middle man.

Really, the only way to take big media out of the picture at all is to reduce copyright terms to some length where not everything is copyrighted anymore.

I will tell you the big downfall for iTunes is price. Steam has crazy sales where you feel you have to buy some of those older games you never got a chance to play. If ITunes had sales where you could buy older movies for $2, I think they would be buried under a deluge of money.

As for Netflix, I love their model but the selection needs to be maintained an they are failing on that front.

Unfortunately for Netflix, they're in the vices of the movie distributors that still want to milk release profits from hotels, ppv, on demand services. Also they want to charge Netflix higher rates which would ultimately kill their model especially if they had to pass that fee onto the consumer.

One of the reasons that Hollywood is so frightened by the internet is that the real cost of producing a movie has fallen hugely - with the possible exception of CGI extravaganzas.

A good quality digital video camera will cost a few thousand dollars - within the reach of a committed film-maker.

High quality DV editing software is sometimes free or of relatively small cost.

Distribution over the internet costs very little.

The huge wage bills of mega-star actors is irrelevant, the same dozen or so names are not the only people on the planet who are good at pretending to be someone else.

Hollywood has been content to regurgitate the same ideas for many years - how many sequels, remakes or 'reboots' can anyone name? I bet it's loads and if not, they've not been paying attention.

The MPAA (and RIAA) cartels are dying because of advancements in technology and their own inertia when it comes to embracing anything outside their outdated and moribund business model.

And that's why we'll see many more heavily funded, massively lobbied attempts to prop up that business model by/while trampling over logic/freedom/individual rights. All under the banner of 'stopping piracy' which is a lot more scary sounding than 'reducing copyright infringement'.

Have you tried getting new releases in any sort of digital format? Yeah...good luck with that. Netflix gets movies like 6 months after everything else. I hate movie studios so much because of this shit. I don't fucking want physical copies of movies, I just want to watch them.

It's obvious when you think about it. Like an app store for movies. Indie film makers won't need to grovel to parasitic distributors anymore, they will be able to market their movies via a youtube trailer and then say 'get the full movie here'.

Are you kidding me? More DRM? More programs needing to run in the background? Another piece of software to install just to show me a web page? And, of course, yet another useless social network to have to manage? No, we do not need a dedicated client, and certainly not another Steam.

To beat the pirates, you have to offer the same, or more, convenience. Direct downloads, clean files, no added bullshit.

What we need is a very simple system, a website, where people can log in with the normal browser they already have, browse an online store, make purchases through a normal cart system, and download normal, clean media files. H264+AAC+MKV, or perhaps WebM, just something very standard, and the optional ability to download the uncompressed file as well. And then they can play those files, at their leisure, using the video player they already have (WMP, VLC, Mplayer, whatever). That is the solution. Anything else is worse than piracy (piracy is indeed free, but comes with a risk).

Edit edit: The "media center PC" is on the rise, but is not yet ubiquitous. Until then, we have TVs with Internet connectivity but only specific software installed on them. Distribute a TV 'app' that connects to the account you made on the website in question, giving you permission to stream files to the TV. Nothing too revolutionary, just a way to keep locked-down TVs working until we have cheap do-what-you-like computers connected to them (there is already plenty of software to let a PC provide for a TV).

To beat the pirates, you have to offer the same, or more, convenience. Direct downloads, clean files, no added bullshit.

Bullshit. The average user WILL WANT a system that automatically handles and organizes their content. Believe it or not this is part of the attractiveness of Steam.

Anything else is worse than piracy

This is where you lose all credibility: The average user doesn't want, or need, clean files. As long as you offer 1080p and 7.1 streams a lot of people will be happy. And I can assure you most will be happy with less: look at iTunes.

But yeah, I wish we could have 180p streams at a reasonable price with reasonable content with International availability.

the business model needs to change, and i'm sure it will just needs some more time.

The only thing we need now is investments by apple/microsoft/google/sony to work on cross-platform titles, smart TVS which have access to the internet and or service that doesn't lock them down, imagine buying a TV from google, it had google's designs, OS, specs. But the market place is universal and not funded by the product maker. I am not exactly legitimately educated on these topics / technologies, however i understand from a perspective that is only gained from embracing the technology that we as a species are still deploying. The time is prime for people working in the entertainment industry to quench the framework that is already in place(the internet) this is going to take more then what is currently being thrown around, these SOPA blackouts are part of an evolution which has been going on since before the current internet came to be, you have these politicians being paid off and or coerced into things from which they do not understand. Correct me if i am wrong but since the time of the internet hasn't it technically removed borders as such but on much larger scale? The internaughts are not bound to content/region locking, i am proud to be living in the now, knowing what it is like to associate with people from all colors, people from all nations and people who make me feel proud to be human who can identify with a global culture who all live on earth, It can't be stopped. The fact of the matter is the only people who are supporting region locking and breakdown of society are these multinational corporations who are still bracing onto a model which is practically for profit, in the process they are breaking what is fundamental to functioning within our global society, communication networks and produce.

pricing system shouldn't be skewed by artificial scarcity(which doesn't exist on the internet as much as it does IRL, oh well i suppose you could consider bandwidth scarce, but that can be remedied(unfortunately corporations / media companies around the US own allot of the infrastructure, so other factions of the corporation are producing media/news/internet services GG)

It'd also be wicked if society as a whole pushed for a centralized entertainment network, where all the big players have to adopt to benefit what would be a cloud based network(acting as a middleman, governments would have to put a percentage of tax for this, which would pay for hosting etc, prices lowered as time goes on.) which contains a huge Databank of media/entrainment, from here on it'd be how the companies choose to advertise, how they market the products, design, specs. As above, all the files would have to be playable on any device of your choosing, anywhere, anytime. No expired dates, no content/region locking, no artificial scarcity, this would cause some problems i imagine.

I still haven't thought up a way how you'd get indie/startups on the right track when you're competing with multinational corporations on preexisting advertising networks, there'd be all sorts of problems such as "exclusive advertising partners"(which already exist if i may add ;|)

There are many benefits to using a cloud based system, privacy isn't one of them, however i think what hollywood and book writers have been signaling to us about the future is sort of true, how in the movies you do see for instance a universal OS, which is connected to a cloud based system, you can travel anywhere and have access to your information/files(Microsoft windows 9+, even windows 8 or i think 7 is moving like that, you integrate it with your email address, so all you need to do is log in with your email to gain access to your userdata profile which is stored in microsofts huge cloud network) that's just the start of it, the future is here but it just needs more thought on the developmental stages, prepping has been done and set in motion long ago.

and now is the time to play with ideas, i hock at ideas by some entrepreneurs who are only looking to make a quick buck from the system, actually i despise most of them for making matters worse.

Thanks for reading, and i hope you can converse with people who are oblivious to the matters in hand in on a person to person level. DIDN'T READ LOLOLOLOLL etc...

Lol...what a title. Yes, I think a lot of us read recently that George Lucas was denied funding BY ALL THE MAJOR MOVIE STUDIOS for his most recent project on the Tuskegee Airmen. If George Lucas can't even get funding for a good idea, then the rest of us are fucked, but then so are the studios for no longer being open to movies that are creative first, then looking at how much money they'll make. That industry is about to turn upside down, for sure.

It's funny how often the same people (I'm not saying you, just making the observation) who hold up sequels as a lack of creativity also think copyright which prevents third parties from appropriating or building on others' artistic output is anti-creativity.

Yeah, no memes, generally interesting posts and discussion. I can understand some not liking it, as an increase of users increases the SNR ratio, just like what happened here, although Reddit has grown into a different beast altogether.

I'm done. I can't deal with trying to bypass their fucking DRM on the DVD's they put out anymore. Why the fuck am I spending countless hours to try and watch movies I paid for? I struggled for days in the past too. Sometimes I get one or two that work, the new ones rarely do.

One time I decided to try a little test (this was back when Stage6 was still around, the high quality Megavideo-like site run by DivX):

I put the DVD in the player, started it going, and then hit up Google on my computer. I managed to get a great-quality Stage6 copyright-infringing copy of said movie up and streaming while my DVD player was still on the DON'T COPY THIS OR WE'LL KILL YOU advert.

True story. I ejected the disc, put it back in it's case and watched the streaming one.

Interesting. Kind of sad that the more legal you go with Hollywood (topic of thread), the more you think you must be a criminal.

I stopped buying DVD's at around 2006 when it finally hit me that I was being a contributor to the problem - though I still inherit one now and again.

Perhaps it's not that we need to outright stop buying hollywood, but budget a little more of how we'd place our votes. If you decide that $50/month goes towards entertainment and media, $5 would go towards those items that you must have from corporations that you deem bad, and the rest towards corporations you deem good.

If you want to watch your movies on your iPad, then you should rebuy them for iPad. The license for DVD were never intended for iPad, and the license for your iPad were never intended for your Xbox. These movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, and you can't spare a measly $10 to rebuy it for each device you want to watch it on? - in before people think I'm serious.

You don't get it. You are not a good consumer. You don't use their approved ways of consuming media. You are not going all the way into dependency by using technology that is convenient for you instead of purchasing the newest in home entertainment systems they promote to you. You will have a lot to learn until you earn their approval... don't think you will be respected though... They will fuck and rob you whenever they please...

Why the fuck am I spending countless hours to try and watch movies I paid for?

I can recommend MakeMKV for ripping DVD/BD media. I have ripped all of my 60~ DVDs and 5~ BDs using this program so that I don't have to keep finding the disks. You can tell it to remove all of the bullshit like trailers and "dont pirate the dvd you just bought you naughty naughty person" messages.

That was so unrealistic that it left me wondering how they actually filmed it to achieve such levels of unrealism.

I liked the windows that were smashed by the guy on the horse, only to be smashed again by his pursuer on a horse, only to be smashed a third time by the guy on the motorcycle. Apparently India has the fastest glaziers in the world.

Average Joe can help this initiative by simply and really stopping watching Hollywood's movies (as in, don't go to the cinema) and stop buying music owned by major record labels (cd's, itunes, spotify, etc).

Only when their revenues collapse, they will actually feel the resistance of the public. They are only this mighty because they have and keep earning the big bucks.

So to help giving future generations a free internet (and free countries, because this thing is internationally applied as well, see ACTA), spread this message:

*STOP PAYING FOR HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTIONS OR MAJOR RECORD COMPANY'S MUSIC. *

Exactly. Revenues for the music/movie industry have been tumbling for a number of years, but instead of recognizing that people just aren't buying they're crappy output as much any more, they scream piracy and attempt to turn off the Internet.

move away from Apple and Microsoft (they loves the copyright as much as HWood).

I shall pre-empt the inevitable protestations that "Microsoft oppose SOPA" by saying that they have supported the PROTECT IP Act ('PIPA') since it was introduced in May, they supported its predecessor (COICA), and they supported SOPA until it started to get bad publicity, and then they only changed their position to "it needs more work". This is the position the bill's sponsor has now taken, and nobody would interpret that as "opposition" to the bill.

Please be aware that Google seems to be getting punished for what they did (note: this is entirely my reasoning after looking at other tech companies' stocks on Friday, and it can be absolutely false). It is not possible to gather data about Facebook since they are private.

I am not sure about Y Combinator, someone can help illuminate us on how to support Y Combinator.

However, if you support Google and Facebook and others because of what they did:

Hurt the MPAA/RIAA first by boycotting them entirely. Please do not resort to piracy since it proves that you consider their products more important than freedom. If possible, refrain from spending on other SOPA/PIPA supporters (you need the list of original supporters from at least 3 weeks ago, not the current list. You should understand that a friend in need is a friend indeed, not the flip-flopers).

Support Google and Facebook (EDIT1) and donations to Wikipedia: Android apps, Facebook apps, spreading this to friends, family, and colleagues.

It is your money and you decide what to do with it, but you can bet on who will win by buying stocks of companies that are against these atrocious bills (SOPA/PIPA and their soon-to-come successors). Perhaps this time self-fulfilling prophecy may come to our advantage (it did not during the 2008 financial crisis). Disclaimer: this advice here is provided as is, use your own judgements.

EDIT0: Please turn off the TV and put down some of the largest newspapers (see one of my other posts for why) and use your wise and unguided judgements to make your own decisions.

I feel like EVERYONE is misunderstanding the post. It's a damn call to action for the entertainment industry!

Ycombinator are some pretty nifty (and well connected) people. They are joining the debate, and in the same breath creating a buzz around the 'disrupting startups of the entertainment industry'.

Everyone wants to make money. It is a good thing. Ycombinator is a driving force behind venture mentality. $$$. Have a good day.

Edit; It's not about killing the entertainment industry. It's about challenging people to invent the NEW entertainment industry by inventing what they are to lazy and stupid to do themselves. And then selling them the companies that do it at 10k% profit :)

Not the people commenting on this post. Most of them seem to want revenge on the entertainment companies so much that they are ready to stop using any visual entertainment products. Which is woefully misguided if you asked me.

Well, Hollywood is a big fat target. They are desperately clinging to an old outdated business model. Y Combinator just might make a killing financing whatever replaces the Hollywood studios. It would be like jumping in at the height of pager sales and financing cell phones.

Just Down Vote Me Now ... You have to look at Hollywood and networks as VCs of their own right. Most of the pilot shows fail and never continue. Movies are massively expensive productions that require a lot of risk and calculation to pull off. Beyond these points, I would take Avatar or Inception over a Zynga/YouTube mashup hell that would be the outcome of a venture funded disruption.

The whole reason they have so many tv show and movie flops is because Hollywood has become so out of touch with the average American and what they want to see. If they were more in tune with what people actually want to see they wouldn't waste so much money. Best example I can think of right now was the DBZ movie. That movie failed ridiculously hard yet those idiots planed for 2 sequels thinking it was easy money.

They take a waterfall approach to content creation. Making massive bets without validating their hypotheses about user engagement. This leads them to make as safe of assumptions as possible, e.g. "Let's just make Spiderman all over again! Brilliant!!." So we get the same boring uninspiring shit.

They do have a formula in much the same way the 4 or 5 songwriters in the USA produce the bulk of what you hear on the radio over a year. The assumption is it always works but the reality can sometimes differ. TBH I haven't really enjoyed an American made film in years. Arthouse production is killing it.

I think he phrased that badly - he means that Hollywood will look at a particular niche (say, videogames, or DBZ, or country music fans, or something) and then make a terrible focus-groupy movie targeted at them. And then wonder why it fails. There is a real reluctance by Hollywood to understand it's audience.

If Nintendo decided to make a Legend Of Zelda movie, it should be one of the greatest things ever made, but the sad truth is that someone like Uwe Boll would get involved and completely destroy the franchise and any chance of a reboot or better attempt.

VCs wish they could conduct themselves like Hollywood. They can't really control which of their investment companies succeed but they'd sure love to have PAC-like powers to legislatively reduce the chances of any investee's competitor that they didn't fund.

TBH I was rather entertained by the DB movie (it wasn't a DBZ movie, but I won't hold that against you since it doesn't really matter). It wasn't anything less then what I was expecting. With that said, it doesn't really hinder your point in anyway.

Build compelling entertainment outside the Hollywood system using the new digital infrastructure they're dead-set against. Right.

It's funny. I started making this argument to my Hollywood agent in 1999, when the dotcom madness was just beginning to erupt here in San Francisco. I told her it was the death knell for her whole industry. She laughed at me, embarrassed that the geeks ever thought they would win.

Over the next three years I was creative director of a handful of companies and content provider to many more. They all rose and fell in the lifespan of a hamster, Citigroup first showering us with billions then pulling the plug sixteen months later when we had failed to provide double-digit profits.

What we learned then is that it's fucking hard to out-compete Hollywood. They have locked up the perceived best talent of our time, the distribution channels, and the eyeballs. The vast majority of their audience have no reason to change. They're perfectly happy where they are.

I realized fairly quickly that I was arguing with people over whether or not their scant leisure time should be spent watching mindless Hollywood blockbusters or something else. They really didn't care. And what made Hollywood so repugnant to me--their political control, their vacuity, their monopolies--were completely irrelevant to most people. In the same way, my eyes glazed over when NFL fans told me that they forever hated the 49ers for changing the economics of the game in the 1980s. Who gives a fuck? I just want to watch football...

The point is that Hollywood isn't for geeks to vanquish. They hate us, just as much as they ever did in high school. No matter how brilliant and compelling our ideas are, for many people this is still a popularity contest and we aren't invited. And that's fine. They can have their Thor and Transformers. As long as it isn't the only game in town.

Here's the real answer: don't kill Hollywood (because you can't). Sidestep it and build parallel entertainment industries that serve minority audiences of many kinds. Deconstruct the mainstream until they're left with their happiest, laziest audience. For the rest of us, million dollar budgets and audience views in the mid-thousands are more than enough.

I thought about this and a number one goal should be to offer movies and shows as they are released on electronic streaming media. That means the day the Hobbit is released you can go see it in theaters or watch at home for the same price if not less of a movie ticket. You start doing this and people will realize how fucking archaic movie theaters are in general almost to the equivalency of drive in movie theaters. This is one of the first steps of killing hollywood is to kill the model that drives it, the idea of a successful movie has to be one that runs well in theaters first and then everywhere else. Fuck that, its pure nonsense that drives the industry to make shitty sequels and generic as hell movies.

I'm conflicted. On one hand I want the system to burn, but on the other hand I love tv and movies. If we could just overhaul the system to favor talent over connection and produce things at a reasonable price, I think things would be okay.

The bigger problem is that these media companies are all now conglomerates. When you go up against the movie industry, you're going up against the television and news industries as well because they're all owned by a handful of corporations. This reflects a larger problem of a few major corporations controlling far too much in the US.

Having read through most of the comments here I have to look up and say that we aren't thinking big enough. We've already got distribution centers such as Netflix to cover that "What Steam did for games" or "iTunes did for music" - they may or may not be good, but that's not the point.

Unlike games which have some brilliant titles and music which still has some really good artists, when was the last time you saw a modern movie and genuinely thought it was brilliant? I can count them on one hand, personally. I think what Y Comb. is saying is that the industry itself is dying; not just the gross mismanaged distribution of it.

I look at the indie route, be it The Guild or C.K's approach and wonder how we can cut the middleman and get truly good entertainment in an evolutionary sort of way: no massive studio funding to keep the crap floating. The quality has to dictate the success again. We're missing that now.

Movies are the latest evolution in storytelling. So the question is: How can we use technology to create a better way to tell stories?

If you're a writer you can write a book just by yourself, and there are already many writers that create awesome stories. Furthermore, from all the movies I've seen and all the books I've read, I think that the story in an average book tends to be of higher quality than the story in an average movie.

An interesting goal for a really disruptive storytelling technology would be to create a tool that allows a writer to create something that looks like a movie but doesn't require much more work than writing a book.
It's already possible to use computers to create a movie without using any cameras, or building physical sets, but it still is a labor intensive and expensive process. Right now you need:

Voice actors to act all the parts

Modelers to create all the 3D models

Texture artists

Animators

Sound effect technicians

Composer & musicians

A rendering farm to render the movie

Let's look at each of these items and see if we can find a way to work around it.

We can start with the easier ones. You don't need a rendering farm, you can use a game engine to render the story in real time using the GPU.
Music & sound effects are also easy to solve. Computers can synthesize music and there are already many composers who allow you to use their music for free or by paying a very small one time fee. You also can buy at a low price a library of sound effects, but below I propose an even better solution for that.

Next we have to look at models & textures. This is harder to solve but I think there might be one solution inspired in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. When you install World of Warcraft on your computer you're installing the whole world with all the models and textures, so that when you play the game all of them are loaded on demand from your local hard disk. So, any company that wants to create a tool that enables a single writer to create a whole movie by himself, would have to invest in creating all the models & textures for a large array of different locations (urban, country, desert, jungle, interiors, exteriors, etc.) that the audience would install on their computer. Then writers would have all those locations available to use for their stories. Furthermore, it would be a good idea to allow third parties to create new locations that can be added to the set of available locations. On top of that, if you are already installing all those models & textures on people's computers then you can also throw in good sound effects library.

All of the above is easy, in the sense that, although it requires a large investment to create a good set of models & textures for the locations, it doesn't require any technological innovation.

Now comes the hard part. The part where we still haven't developed the needed technology. We need digital actors that can play their roles by themselves. The writer should only be required to give them their lines & stage directions. This would require some more research in how to improve text to speech synthesizers & procedural animation. But I do believe that's something that could be solved in the next ten years.

For a start: how hard is it to have a program that can automate the creation of a musical piece? I have my own ideas, but I am welcoming initiatives. Perhaps we'll just throw ideas here and let the programmers figure out how to implement them. (EDIT4) My idea: Is it possible to automatically learn patterns of a collection of musical works to produce new ones (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky)?

EDIT0: be careful if you are using MP3: it can be killed by the patents' ambiguities. OGG is safer but not as popular. Perhaps need to campaign people to boycott MP3 and switch to OGG first.

EDIT5: Can we ask the biologists how they use DNA to do so many wonderful things, and can we have DNA for music that can do some similar things? I don't know all the details of computational biology field, but they can identify genes that cause diseases or that some groups of people share some common genes.

EDIT6: If there are some specific rules in music, are they like I before E except after C? How hard is it to deduce something similar when it comes to notes in music, especially for a particular genre?

EDIT11: In case you have a successful (semi)auto-composer, I think it is better if the license says explicitly that the works produced by the program (or its derivatives) are not to be included in products of the "Big Six" (Wikipedia for MPAA to see the list). Other than that one condition, the works produced by the program or its forks are free of copyrights. So it is a conditional type of copyrights with the aim of not to let the MPAA use it.

Secondly, what tools do people use nowadays to produce movies with? (EDIT1)Can we make better tools for free in order to both speed up and lower the costs of movie producing process? (EDIT3) Dear Youtube's brightest and most creative producers/comedians/actors/actresses/musicians, what tools do you need to produce world-class works lasting at least 2 hours?

EDIT9: Can we use Microsoft Kinect to make producing 3D cartoon movies easier?

EDIT10: Products released should be coordinated with boycotting MPAA/RIAA: pay-per-view model with the goal of minimizing the cost as much as possible, so the price is significant lower than that of the studios but the quality should be the same. If consumers think they can get something comparable with cheaper price, they'll return next time, even when the boycott is over. Letting people keep the copies to share with poor friends is reasonable, but let them know that the small payment made can be used to support the whole production team (Wikipedia is a good example), not bonuses for some greedy CEOs who think everyone is a pirate.

EDIT12: EDIT2: At the moment, due to the recent Supreme Court ruling, I think GPL is safer than other types of licenses. At the moment, any type of free and open licenses that can be successfully defended in courts due to recent Supreme Court ruling is suitable. GPL or Creative Commons are some examples. In addition, IANAL.

Here you are, speaking nonsense about music and investment, and dreaming about what programming could achieve.

Ridiculous.

The idea behind Y combinator isn't to replace the artist. Do you really think that creator == Hollywood ? The only thing Hollywood has been imaginative with is how to turn the profit of Forrest Gump and LOTR into net loss.

You speak of audio engineering, without even thinking that you're not the first on the subject, and your idea are fucking vague. There are more talented, more invested people already on the making of new tools.

What the flying fuck about MP3 ? You present this idea as revolutionary, but the patent problem and the audio drawbacks are since long known by the industry.

I just can't wrap my head around the fact that you deemed reasonable to propose to build a machine capable of replacing the artists, in order to fight MPAA. This is such bullshit...

I am not an expert in machine learning or artificial intelligence. I am, however, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at one of the best CS programs in the country and am reasonably versed in the state of the art in most subfields of CS.

Automatically producing a work that is equivalent in mastery to Bach or Beethoven is a monumental task that we are nowhere near to. It is possible to deduce rules from much of Bach's work very easily since fugue form is so regular. The key to writing a great fugue is to write a theme that can be varied in interesting ways. This is a much more difficult task. I'm sure you could find computer generated fugues on the web and compare them to Bach's and I guarantee you that there will be no comparison.

Deducing rules from Beethoven is even more difficult since much of his music breaks convention or is based on extra-musical ideas. For example, the 6th symphony is an early example of program music, which would be even more difficult for a computer to create.

That said, the cost of entry in creating popular music is extremely low today. Protools and other similar software combined with the generally undiscerning ear of most listeners means that you don't need to produce anything near a masterpiece to be wildly successful. Hell, just look at punk in the 70s to see that being bad at your chosen instrument can be seen as a selling point (I'm looking at you Sid Vicious). This is one of the reasons why independent music has been able to be as successful as it has been in recent years.

Movies are another thing entirely. Producing even a low budget feature length film typically takes dozens of people, if not more (don't take to me about Primer, I would be heartbroken if in the future all films looked that crappy). Cameras and film (if you choose to use it) are very expensive as well. I don't know what kind of editing software exists today, but that is probably an avenue for reducing the cost of producing a film. Distribution is also a much more serious challenge for film than music since there is no equivalent to "tour around in a van and play lots of places to get your name out." High costs coupled with difficult distribution keep filmmakers firmly attached to distribution companies of at least moderate size.

I wouldn't say there's no comparison. David Cope has been working on this very project--algorithms that write music in the style of a particular composer--for years, and he's wound up with some very interesting results.

For the most part, it won't fool a knowledgeable listener, but for the average listener, it's pretty convincing. I don't know if anyone's done formal experiments to test this en masse, but Cope (or maybe it was Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote the first chapter), in Virtual Music, relates a few anecdotal cases where even highly trained classical professors didn't reliably distinguish between machine and original composer. (This was only possible using relatively obscure pieces, of course, because otherwise they'd all recognize the work to begin with.) Memorably, the book includes an email that was sent from one of the professors in an audience during one of these demonstrations, where he and many of the musicians sitting around him were shocked to find they'd chosen incorrectly between an actual Chopin piece and one created by Cope's software, EMI ("Emmy").

He has some MP3s available here, for any interested parties. (Cue thousands of Redditors proudly boasting about how they wouldn't have been fooled, come on, the music's so obviously formulaic and soul-less.) The Bach invention isn't that great; but personally I find the Chopin mazuka to be pretty compelling--perhaps not quite at the level you expect of Chopin normally, but easily at the level of an experienced human composer nonetheless. (For the record, I don't know if this mazurka is the same one from Cope's anecdote.) The Beethoven sonata sounds way too much like the Moonlight Sonata, only warped, I think.

Are you proposing a hypothetical world where all music had been classical up until the 20th century, and, at this point, computers would be unable to invent music in the style of Sid Vicious? Is the assumption here that a "Sex Pistols" group could spontaneously develop in this world, without any blues, R&B, ragtime, a history folk songs, or any other non-classical music influences? If so, I think you're giving too much credit to human ingenuity and not enough to the musical environment that spawns new genres. It would be possible, but highly unlikely, just as a computer generating melodies at random without any input would be highly unlikely to invent punk rock on its own. Humans can't help but create music that is influenced by what they've heard before, no matter how new it is.

Anyway, in my comment I wasn't trying to make any statement about whether we ought to be aiming to "replace" human composers with computers, I was just providing information about what one composer/programmer has done in that field.

Forget fugues, let's keep simple and talk about four bar blues. You could easily generate four bar blues melodies w/ infinitely different guitar and even throw in note bending, no problem.

But after hearing the first few automations, who in the hell is going to want to hear more ? There isn't going to be any unique timbre of unique voices with unique emotions. There also isn't going to be unique timing that ebbs and flows with the emotion of the song. It's just going to sound automated, that's the problem.

Music does not need to be original. But it needs to make listeners empathize.

It is easier to love music when you see an orchestra than when you see speakers, because an orchestra is full of respected people who evidently love music. Loving it too helps you be a little like them.

You can empathize with a human composer, but it'd be hard to empathize with an algorithm.

Then again, maybe an algorithm can take something you can empathize with, and turn it into a composition. Example: Find one particular genre's musical approximation of certain keywords. Say you collect the kinds of music Shakespeare probably heard, and see what kind of melodies, instrumentations etc. are most associated with terms like "heaven", "earth", "philosophy" or "dream" and combine them into a piece called "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

And then market it as what Shakespeare would have written if he had been a composer. I bet that'd sell.

The key to writing a great fugue is to write a theme that can be varied in interesting ways. This is a much more difficult task. I'm sure you could find computer generated fugues on the web and compare them to Bach's and I guarantee you that there will be no comparison.

Thank you for expressing the idea clearly which I was floundering about with.

I think a better idea is just to invest in hollywood killing companies,
It's capitalism at it's finest.
Video killed the radio star, now the internet will (figuratively) kill the video star.
It's already possible with youtube shows, podcasts, etc.
All that is needed is talent that can compete competitively with hollywood at the fraction of the cost.

Killing the radio star didn't kill music though. Killing the radio star just ended the era of faceless musicians- you had to be visually presentable to turn a profit in music. Even if you're played on the radio, you have to be visually presentable enough to be shown on TV to become huge.

Similarly, the internet killing the "video star," (though, "theater star," would be a better term) wouldn't mean we kill movies or theaters. It would just mean we change the terms on which production and distribution are based.

Enthusiast hdslr videographer here. The industry standard for producing videos are avid, final cut pro and the adobe creative suite. Adobe is on the bottom amateur-pro range, fcp goes from people upgrading from imovie (to imovie pro a.k.a. Final cut pro X) to low budget hollywood movie. Hollywood uses avid with all those proprietary hardware.

I've tried all the open source alternative. Nothing comes close to replicating even adobe premiere for video editigng etc and all the supported plugins. To make matters worse, the proprietary apple prores codec is the defacto standard for broadcast delivery their encoder is apple only. The alternatice is avid's freelicensed dnxhd. But I can't get it to work undwr linux

In the 3D vfx front is another matter. The open source blender can atually competewith 3d software used by high end hollywood productiona like maya softimage and houdini.

Apologies for typos. Im on alien blue which decided to suck right now.

How hard is it to have a program that can automate the creation of software? I have my own ideas, but I am welcoming invites. My idea: Is it possible to automatically learn patterns of code of a collection of programs to produce new ones (Photoshop, AutoCad, Halo, Microsoft Bob)?

Except there's actually been a ton of research into algorithmic music, including some fairly successful examples. Genetic programming is in it's far infancy compared to algorithmic music, in large part because judging music is vastly simpler than judging the quality and utility of software.

Software has incompleteness properties, so not all software can be created automatically. Music has no such known limitations, and the mathematics currently known to underlie music doesn't seem nearly so complex as a software system.

Finally, I actually agree that some software development should be automated. In fact, much of today's software is automatically generated. For instance, garbage collection replaced memory management code, data objects generated from database schemas, automatic parallelization technology, compilers, etc. Notice how software developers still aren't obsolete despite the automation?

I don't think we need to ban mp3. That's wishful thinking. Same with banning the devices that can't play ogg, which is also wishful thinking.

For Audio Production, there's Ardour & LMMS.

Video production is a very very tricky thing because it involves a lot more processing power to process things in real time with the right codecs. I don't know what raw formats come out of cameras (DV?), and I don't know their legal repercussions. It's not reasonable though for someone do shoot all day only to come back to the studio and have to convert everything to another format just to edit it... nevermind all the tools to do so.

Exporting to the webm seems to be the easier part of it (VP8 and Ogg Vorbis), but how would I know?

Nobody says anything about banning MP3. It is just that MP3 requires licensing in lots of countries, so you will be at risk of getting choked off by licensing fees and legal battles if you risk using MP3. I do not think that videos can be automated yet, but music is possible (I am still unsure, so I asked for experts' opinions and comments).

Automated composition is something I am very interested in and have been for a long time. It's an active research area and lots of people are working on it.

The main conceptual problem is that no one knows what 'beauty' is; it's very subjective and people's perception of it changes dramatically based on other information. For example, people often find algorithmically generated music beautiful at first, but when told a computer made it they often take the 180 degree position and say it sucks.

The most important application of this, I suppose, is to automatically generate accompanying music for videos. AC is ideal for this purpose since when you have video and audio together, people focus more on the video. Also, software can automatically generate music that is perfectly synchronized to the video. These guys did some interesting stuff: http://juke-bot.com/ but I've never actually used it.

Don't know anything about music but once was part of a project, that tried to film a web series on no budget (meaning around 5000$)and let me tell you, the basic equipment e.g. camera, sound and editing tools weren't the expensive part. We nearly got these for free, but other things like lights, food and travel expenses really cut into our budget.
We even had been able to get back nearly all our investment into the first 20 episodes (around 60min of content all in all), by selling it to a start up platform for web series, that was heavily financed by one of the biggest telecom players.

And guess what: that platform never took of, because the broad masses are still quite content with the product and distribution system Hollywood has to offer.
I just hope, that with the growing connection between the internets and viewing devices like TV/Smartphones/Consoles the average guy will be more accepting on offers that are not delivered to him by the traditional channels.TL;DR: For this to be successful, the viewing habits of the average guy need to change.

Can we make better tools for free in order to both speed up and lower the costs of movie producing process?

Yes, dear God yes. I have been craving a free video editor for years. Every free editor out there sucks nuts, I tried them all. What it needs to do is the following: Edit clips in a timeline and be able to add simple transitions. Nintey times out of a hundred you'll see fade in, fade out used. That's all. Second are cross fade and then wipes, but these are less common. Star wipes, etc. are not needed.

At a more technical level, it needs to be able to accept large files and off the bat include support for .MPG, .AVI, .MOV and hopefully .FLV and .MP4 (especially for output if you want to put your videos on YouTube). That's basically it. Pinnacle for Windows is about the best thing out there, the cheapest version of which is $60. I don't know how much of that goes to the "studio" or whoever you want to rail against, but if a free alternative cropped up, I'd be all over it.

Automatically creating music is actually pretty easy. The rules of music, scales, harmony, rhythm etc. is fairly well defined. The problem is making interesting music, because interesting most often implies breaking these same rules. When and how those rules should be broken is the creative part, and most often culturally dependent.

E.g. the idea of distorting the sound of electric guitars, which led to punk, metal and a significant amount of the music made today, came about because someone broke a guitar speaker and thought it sounded cool. The reason it sounded cool was because it sounded really raw and guttural, and at the time that was just what was needed to make music that resonated well with the audience of the time. It most likely wasn't the first time someone broke a guitar speaker, but it was the right time, and the right guy that heard the sound.

For the foreseeable future, making such culturally relevant choices about when and how to break the rules will unfortunately be impossible.

I'm sorry but this is just hilarious. These are long standing problems. Music composition is a long standing challenge in AI. It's quite possible for an AI to create an original pleasant piece of music but they're nowhere near the stage where they can create music which can play with your emotions or make you go "wow"

Computers used to have (rather primitive) MIDI synthesizers built in to their sound cards at a hardware level. Just about every 90s computer game had music synthesized at runtime from midi files which were only a few KB each. The issue at the time was the (relatively) insane file sizes of actual recordings, until they made the move to CD-ROM games with CD-track audio.

Nowdays something like this would be done in software... The '8-bit' sound is kind of 'in' at the moment so I don't see why you couldn't sacrifice a bit of quality for performance.

But then again, if you don't care about quality, just deliver mp3 or ogg, like you said.

(I think I'm going round in circles here.)

I guess I was thinking along the lines of a clientside program that spits out random soothing midi sequences all day while you work.

Yeah, if you want just the music, midi is the way to go. But you can't capture a "performance" that way. It's not a recording. You can't hear the musician catch his breath, or scratch his guitar string, or fumble a note and play it off. The music is still there, but the human aspect goes away. It's still enjoyable, but it's not the same. It's TOO perfect.

You can get a full performance with WAV, but the size of that thing is massive.

mp3 and ogg is good enough to capture the performance in such a way that unless you know what to look for, you won't know it's not a WAV, but it saves an order of magnitude in size.

All disruptive technology does that. It replicates the function but lacks the soul of the thing it replaces.

In other respects I agree with you. Growing up, I used to record songs off the radio onto WAV files, and when MP3 came along it enabled me and my buddies to start sharing music files (that weren't MIDI!) by splitting MP3 files across only a few floppies. Painful by today's standards but double-clicking songs to listen to them off a hard drive was still more convenient than tape.

About your music idea, from what I know a lot of machine learning is based on calculating probabilities from observing patterns, so I would say its possible to train a classifier to produce new samples and correct them based on your input (good/bad etc).

I'm sort of a novice in machine learning but it does seem doable. You just have to select good (robust?) features to use from the music stream which will be used to calculate the probabilities.

The only problem I can think of is that it would be very computationally expensive and we may not have enough musical input nor a solid definition of what constitutes good music to classify.

edit: I just realized that once a pattern has been classified you still need to produce new music using it, so I guess its kind of difficult to produce a new musical work from an algorithm, given a few good patterns, you still need a bit of human touch for that.

What I mean by that is, what kind of car are you driving right now? There is a damn good chance its a Japanese model. They are damn good cars for the most part.

That did not happen overnight. In the 70's, when General Motors had something like 60% of the car market, Japanese car companies put out mainly garbage. They were cheaper, but the cars they put out did not have the longevity or quality of American cars of the time.

The Japanese knew this, they hated being second in quality to anyone. Especially sloppy Americans. So, they did two things, they copied good visual design until they could do that themselves, and they sent engineers to tour American factories, seriously, no one was afraid of them. Can you imagine that happening now? Anyhow, they took copious notes, figuring out what worked, what did not work, and what could be done better.

So the Japanese car industry was not a copy of the American car industry, it was built from the ground up with American failures in mind. And in the 80's it got progressively better. And then, well, how many 1990 camrys and corrolas do you still see on the road now?

So where is web media now? Somewhere in the early 80's producing decent stuff that needs a bit more craftsmanship and advertising.

But at first, it will have to look a bit like what we have now, a tv network or something. With a schedule. And well-crafted product.

I applaud their motives, but this statement from their post has me cringing - "If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten."

The penalty rule is a perfectly legitimate part of football's laws. Those laws are critical to the running of the game and fair to both sides. SOPA on the other hand was a desperate attempt to make laws entirely for the benefit for one side. Comparing it to a penalty is to give it far more of a veneer of legitimacy than it deserves.